On 24 and 25 November 2015, we will showcase the NewsReader project and invite you to come explore our technology and its results yourself during our NewsReader Workshop and Hackathon. 

Our dataset encompasses 12 years of news charting the struggle of automotive players to rule the global market, to satisfy the expectations of the shareholders, and their suffering from the financial crisis and new economies: industrial heroes going down!

The Workshop

Tuesday 24 November 2015, 14:00 – 18:00 Amsterdam Public Library 

In this workshop, we will bring together start-ups, companies, researchers and developers to present and discuss the NewsReader project, the technological domains it draws from and future applications for these technologies.

This afternoon will feature invited talks, demos, a panel discussion and a networking reception.

Confirmed Speaker:

  • Prof. dr. Frank van Harmelen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.  Frank van Harmelen is a professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning in the AI department (Faculty of Science) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. After studying mathematics and computer science in Amsterdam, he moved to the Department of AI in Edinburgh, where he was awarded a PhD in 1989 for his research on meta-level reasoning.
  • Bernardo Magnini, Bernardo Magnini is senior researcher at FBK, where he is the scientific coordinator of the Cognitive Computing research line. His interests are in the field of Natural Language Processing, particularly lexical semantics, question answering and textual entailment. He has launched EVALITA, the evaluation campaign for both NLP and speech tools for Italian and has co-chaired CLIC-it 2014, the first Italian conference on Computational Linguistics. He currently serves as President of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics.
  • Sybren Kooistra, De Volkskrant and Yournalism. Sybren Kooistra is a data journalist at De Volkskrant and co-founder and editor-chief of Yournalism, a platform for investigative journalism. In 2008, he went to the United States as an aide to Obama’s presidential campain. In 2013 he won a prize at an international press innovation contest for the news website of the future. He studied sociology, political science and social geography at Radboud University Nijmegen.

The Hackathon 

Wednesday 25 November 2015, 10:00 – 18:00 Amsterdam Public Library 

In June 2014 and January 2015 we ran several hackathons in both London and Amsterdam in which NewsReader enabled the attendees to pull out networks of interactions between entrepreneurs, politicians, companies and thoroughly test drive our technology. This November, we’re releasing a new version of our processing pipeline and we’re scaling up to 10 million processed news articles from sources about the automotive industry to obtain a searchable database of the news. At the hackathon, you can play with this dataset and explore the processing pipeline.

The global automotive industry has a value in the order of $1 trillion annually. The industry comprises a massive network of suppliers, manufacturers, advertisers, marketeers and journalists. Each of these players has his/her own story, often with unexpected origins or endings; one day you may be CEO of a big car company, the next you are out and making pizzas. With NewsReader, you can uncover these stories to reconstruct the past.

This event may be of interest to you if:

  • You’re interested in natural language processing and/or semantic web technology
  • You’re a data journalist on an automotive desk;
  • You’re an analyst sifting daily news looking for information on your company or on competitors;
  • You’re a data analyst looking to understand how your customers operate their supply chain
  • You’re an analyst trying to find secondary events that could influence an investment decision;
  • You’re interested in visualising big data

Attendance is free but please register by 22 November 17:00 CET.